LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
2010 Webby Award Winner for Best Political Blog
 
May 27, 2012
Log in / Register

 Choose a size
Text Size

Trending:     robert scheer     barack obama     gay marriage     chris hedges     ndaa
Most Read

Say 'Hi-Ho!' as They Strip-Search You

TED: 'A Money-Soaked Orgy of Self-Congratulatory Futurism'

I Can't Hear Myself Think

A Rare Admission That Money Trumps Everything Else

'Left, Right & Center': The Democrats' Private Equity Paradox

Most Comments
Most Emailed

Reports
Why Bain Questions Matter
OSHA Struggles When Tower Climbers Die

Ear to the Ground

A/V Booth

Arts & Culture
Better Than We Found It
The Good-Natured Dictator

Digs
Financial Meltdown 101

Truthdig Bazaar
Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina

By Deus Ex Machina
$10.17

more items

 
Tags

Tag: Book


Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)

Student Debt as a Human Rights Issue

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: A student loan crisis just in time for graduation and “More Powerful Than Dynamite” author Thai Jones.

Posted on May 25, 2012 READ MORE


Student Debt as a Human Rights Issue

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: A student loan crisis just in time for graduation and “More Powerful Than Dynamite” author Thai Jones.

Posted on May 25, 2012 READ MORE



AP/Jerome Delay

Blue Man Coup, Part 2: War for God, Country and Cocaine

Are the emirs of the Sahara criminals or revolutionaries? A little bit of both, probably.

Posted on May 16, 2012 READ MORE  |  6 COMMENTS



Illustration by Mr. Fish

Colonized by Corporations

We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized.

Posted on May 14, 2012 READ MORE  |  191 COMMENTS



Photo by Center for American Progress (CC-BY-ND)

Why Paul Krugman Avoids Thinking About Israel

The New York Times columnist is paid for his opinions, but he says, “like many liberal American Jews ... I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going.” And where it’s going, writes Krugman, is “national suicide.”

Posted on Apr 24, 2012 READ MORE  |  142 COMMENTS



Jon Rawlinson (CC-BY)

Not Only Slavery, but AIDS Too

Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin suggest in their new book, “Tinderbox,” that colonialists’ aggressive trade practices opened new travel routes in central Africa that helped spread a disease rooted in a dense forest to the world beyond.

Posted on Apr 19, 2012 READ MORE  |  2 COMMENTS



Illustration by Mr. Fish

Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You

Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors justify their existence by turning even the mundane into a potential threat. And by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag.

Posted on Apr 2, 2012 READ MORE  |  149 COMMENTS



Would You Like Sugar and Fat With That?

Tracie McMillan, author of “The American Way of Eating,” goes undercover in grocery stores, restaurants and the country’s agricultural fields to find out why it’s so hard for us to eat healthy food.

Posted on Mar 22, 2012 READ MORE  |  26 COMMENTS



Decade of the Living Dead

“Zombie Banks: How Broken Banks and Debtor Nations Are Crippling the Global Economy” is a grisly and horrifying true story of bloodsucking, flesh-eating, life-destroying fiends.

Posted on Mar 15, 2012 READ MORE  |  17 COMMENTS



AP / Benoit Photo

A Day at the Races

This is about horses and how they saved my family’s life, and how, one day, I would come to repay the favor.

Posted on Mar 6, 2012 READ MORE  |  6 COMMENTS



Shining India

The raw pathos of the characters in “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” is of the kind usually found in great fiction, except in Katherine Boo’s book, they’re real people.

Posted on Feb 24, 2012 READ MORE  |  2 COMMENTS


Lawrence Lessig on ‘Fixing the Republic’

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Lawrence Lessig discusses his new e-book, “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic,” and his optimism that movements like Occupy Wall Street can help set our democracy back on course.

Posted on Feb 24, 2012 READ MORE  |  6 COMMENTS



Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)

Lawrence Lessig on ‘Fixing the Republic’

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Lawrence Lessig discusses his new e-book, “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic,” and his optimism that movements like Occupy Wall Street can help set our democracy back on course.

Posted on Feb 24, 2012 READ MORE  |  1 COMMENT



This Gay Man Represented the President

James C. Hormel’s transformation from a confused and closeted gay kid to the nation’s first openly gay ambassador is chronicled in his memoir “Fit to Serve.”

Posted on Feb 17, 2012 READ MORE  |  4 COMMENTS


Will We Choose a Chinese Future?

For the last two decades, we’ve heard many myths purporting to explain the loss of American manufacturing jobs.

Posted on Feb 17, 2012 READ MORE  |  11 COMMENTS



Political Divide

Are voters as polarized as their elected officials? The question, which has serious implications in an election year, has put political scientists at loggerheads in several new and recent books.

Posted on Feb 10, 2012 READ MORE  |  7 COMMENTS



Mr. Fish

The Cancer in Occupy

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state.

Posted on Feb 6, 2012 READ MORE  |  1192 COMMENTS



Kim Jong Un, This One’s for You

“The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson is a rich, careening, dystopian tale that gives us a visceral hit of life inside North Korea.

Posted on Feb 3, 2012 READ MORE  |  31 COMMENTS



Sony Pictures

‘Dragon Tattoo’ Shows Too Much Skin for India

India may be the world’s biggest democracy, but it has a little something to learn about free expression. Film censors have banned the Hollywood version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” because of three sexual and/or violent scenes.

Posted on Jan 30, 2012 READ MORE  |  5 COMMENTS



A Unique Face of Evil

“Himmler was the complete opposite of a faceless functionary,” Peter Longerich writes in “Heinrich Himmler.” “The position he built up over the years can instead be described as an extreme example of the almost total personalization of political power.”

Posted on Jan 27, 2012 READ MORE  |  30 COMMENTS



No Mickey in This ‘Maus’

Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus” is a 300-page user’s guide to his own Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” (you know, Holocaust-graphic-novel-Jews-as-mice-Nazis-as-cats).

Posted on Jan 20, 2012 READ MORE  |  8 COMMENTS        



Europe in Free Fall

In “After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent,” Walter Laqueur explains how Europe’s success in constructing a harmonious community of states actually masked serious social, economic and political vulnerabilities that proved too fragile to bear the world’s most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Posted on Jan 13, 2012 READ MORE  |  22 COMMENTS



Mr. Fish

James Cone’s Gospel of the Penniless, Jobless, Marginalized and Despised

The true power of the Christian gospel is its unambiguous call for liberation from forces of oppression and for a fierce and uncompromising condemnation of all who oppress.

Posted on Jan 9, 2012 READ MORE  |  127 COMMENTS



Sin and Sustenance

Lauren B. Davis’ thrilling, polyphonic new novel, “Our Daily Bread,” takes us into a backwoods clan rife with child abuse and incest, and asks the question: “When does another person’s suffering become my responsibility?”

Posted on Jan 6, 2012 READ MORE  |  5 COMMENTS



Can I Help You?

In this excerpt from Lauren B. Davis’ new novel, “Our Daily Bread,” an elderly woman encounters two troubled boys and the question of whether we ever do enough to help others.

Posted on Jan 4, 2012 READ MORE  |  2 COMMENTS



Doubts About Eloquence

“The desire to be inspired,” William F. Gavin writes in “Speechwright,” “to be uplifted, to be made to feel deeply, to be swept away, and thrilled is the mark of jaded citizens who have forgotten that the major goal of political rhetoric should be to make good arguments, clearly and honestly.”

Posted on Dec 30, 2011 READ MORE  |  10 COMMENTS



Jesus Was Lynched

According to James H. Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Jesus was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched almost 5,000 black people in this country. The lynching tree is the cross in America.

Posted on Dec 23, 2011 READ MORE  |  67 COMMENTS



God of the Oppressed

In this excerpt from “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” James H. Cone writes that the gospel is found wherever the wronged struggle for justice.

Posted on Dec 21, 2011 READ MORE  |  8 COMMENTS



Illustration from an AP photo by Chad Rachman

Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt

What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Posted on Dec 16, 2011 READ MORE  |  155 COMMENTS



So, About That Severed Ear …

A marvelous new biography of Vincent Van Gogh asks what if it was untreatable epilepsy that drove him mad, he didn’t cut off his lobe for a woman and he was killed by delinquents rather than committing suicide?

Posted on Dec 16, 2011 READ MORE  |  4 COMMENTS



The Evolution of Feminism

Jennifer Baumgardner’s new book of essays and interviews, “F ’em! Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls,” connects generations of women thinking about women, from the suffragettes to women’s libbers, from riot grrrls to Lady Bloggers.

Posted on Dec 9, 2011 READ MORE  |  13 COMMENTS



What Does Your Feminism Look Like?

In this excerpt from “F ’em! Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls,” author Jennifer Baumgardner lays out a history of feminism in “waves”: from the rights of citizenship and equality to transgenderism, male feminists and sex work.

Posted on Dec 7, 2011 READ MORE  |  9 COMMENTS



Corporate Wolf Eats Grandmother Alive

Ellen E. Schultz’s “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers” reveals how fleecing the elderly is just business as usual for corporations. If the retirement industry isn’t reined in, she concludes, we’ll be right back where we were in the 1930s.

Posted on Dec 2, 2011 READ MORE  |  11 COMMENTS



Joseph Voves (CC-BY)

Thought Crime in Washington

Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen. The government just did not like what he wrote.

Posted on Nov 28, 2011 READ MORE  |  92 COMMENTS



Baltimore: The City That Bleeds

David Kennedy, author of “Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America,” spent more than 10 years in the worst corners of the worst cities in the country before going to Baltimore.

Posted on Nov 23, 2011 READ MORE  |  1 COMMENT



The New York Times Refused to Print This Book’s Title

When publishers announced the forthcoming release of “Adios, Mofo: Why Rick Perry Will Make America Miss George W. Bush” in August, The New York Times ran a notice referring to the book only as a work “with an unprintable title.” (more)

Posted on Nov 21, 2011 READ MORE  |  5 COMMENTS



Ha Ha, Another Midlife Crisis

Howard Jacobson’s novel “No More Mr. Nice Guy” travels well-worn territory: the male midlife crisis in search of laughs.

Posted on Nov 17, 2011 READ MORE



The Myth of the ’60s

Edward P. Morgan, in this excerpt from “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy,” maintains that “the mass media’s ‘’60s’ discourse is chiefly one of ghosts, accusations, and smoke and mirrors that has long played on audience emotions and diverted public attention to what is essentially a symbolic form of spectator politics.”

Posted on Nov 16, 2011 READ MORE  |  23 COMMENTS



Kenny Sun (CC-BY)

The Brave New World of Occupy Wall Street

We got word just after 1 a.m. Tuesday that New York City police were raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment.

Posted on Nov 15, 2011 READ MORE  |  32 COMMENTS



Mea Culpa, That’s My Gun

In “The Shadow World,” Andrew Feinstein gives us perhaps the most comprehensive account of the global arms trade ever written, an industry in which the supreme ideology is greed.

Posted on Nov 11, 2011 READ MORE  |  5 COMMENTS


Robert Reich and Robert Scheer at Occupy L.A. Teach-In

Last weekend former Labor Secretary Reich and Truthdig Editor Scheer, who, in his own words, got a little wound up, were among the luminaries teaching in at the Occupy L.A. encampment.

Posted on Nov 10, 2011 READ MORE  |  27 COMMENTS



The Confidence Crumbles

An excerpt from Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President” looks into the perilous political labyrinth navigated by our nation’s leader.

Posted on Nov 9, 2011 READ MORE  |  4 COMMENTS



Kevin Dooley (CC-BY)

American Decline Is Crushing the Middle Class

Only 21 percent of all respondents in a new poll think the lives of their children will be better than their own.

Posted on Nov 2, 2011 READ MORE  |  20 COMMENTS



Campus Intrigue

An excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel, “The Marriage Plot,” which centers on a romantic triangle at Brown University in 1982.

Posted on Nov 2, 2011 READ MORE



Sincerely, Sam Beckett

“I keep an eye on the love life of the Colorado beetle and work against it,” Samuel Beckett writes in this second volume of his collected letters. “… That is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!”

Posted on Oct 28, 2011 READ MORE  |  10 COMMENTS



Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey

‘The Empire of Death’

In this special Web-exclusive Halloween edition of Truthdig Radio, Howie Stier interviews art historian Paul Koudounaris, whose macabre new book explores fetishistic tombs and morbid monuments around the world.

Posted on Oct 27, 2011 READ MORE


‘The Empire of Death’

In this special Web-exclusive Halloween edition of Truthdig Radio, Howie Stier interviews art historian Paul Koudounaris, whose macabre new book explores fetishistic tombs and morbid monuments around the world.

Posted on Oct 27, 2011 READ MORE  |  2 COMMENTS



Paul Weiskel (CC-BY)

How the Rich Subverted the Legal System

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious.

Posted on Oct 25, 2011 READ MORE  |  35 COMMENTS



Incarceration—It’s Catching

Is the massive surge of imprisonment a contagious disease? Does the answer lie in the structure of our democracy? Two new books suggest so.

Posted on Oct 21, 2011 READ MORE  |  19 COMMENTS


View older articles:  1 2 3 >  Last »

View the most popular tags overall?

Newsletter

Get Truthdig in your inbox


 
 
 
Join the Liberal Blog Advertising Network
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2012 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.